The Four Quadrants of American Politics
By Nikhil P
The Atlanta DSA Medium is a collection of individual member op-eds, educational blogs, and other thoughts from the Left. Opinions expressed on our Medium are those of the author only.
As socialists, our goal is to unite the working class and claim true democratic control over the society we have built. Unfortunately, the modern American political system, and the existing culture wars that dominate our media, aggressively work to limit this kind of united class struggle from happening. To undermine these divisions, we have to understand them.
Our society is controlled by the capitalist and managerial class — but this class has divisions, and the divisions are the main form of politics we witness. The conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, and between “woke” and “traditional” cultural values, are largely conflicts between different sections of the capitalist class. Specifically, the professional and non-professional capitalist class.
At times, the working class is able to influence things — but the ability for the working class to form an independent voice has grown more and more difficult. Labor unions have steadily weakened. Our media constantly downplays the importance of class, so as a consequence the working class largely adopts the cultural values and the politics of their managers. In other words, the working class has also become divided between the professional and non-professional working class. Together with the divisions among the capitalist class, we have the four main quadrants of American politics.
The Professional Capitalist Class
Modern capitalism is globalized, and globalization leads to hyper-competition. The fastest growing companies in the world define themselves through exclusive technological innovations. They require workforces with increasingly unique and specialized skills. Their management, in turn, must be heavily selected to optimize growth and profit.
From this dynamic, we see the rise of the modern giants of our economy. Tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have become household names, their services now heavily embedded into the everyday lives of many Americans. But the Professional Capitalist Class also extends to other industries. Finance has one of the most extreme hiring curves of any industry. Goldman Sachs has over 12,000 “Vice Presidents”.
The Professional Capitalist Class represents itself as the innovators, the transformers of our current way of life. “Disruption” is a word looked upon fondly by the venture capitalists of Silicon Valley. The drive now is to expand technology and centralized corporate control to all sectors of everyday life — transportation, food, housing, education, parenting, and mental health are just a few examples. A handful of social media companies hold hegemonic control over the entirety of what many Americans are able to see and access in the news. To quote Catherine Liu:
“The post-1968 PMC [Professional Managerial Class] elite has become ideologically convinced of its own unassailable position as comprising the most advanced people the earth has ever seen. They have, in fact, made a virtue of their vanguardism. Drawing on the legacy of the counterculture and its commitment to technological and spiritual innovations, PMC elites try to tell the rest of us how to live, and in large part, they have succeeded in destroying and building in its own image the physical and now cybernetic infrastructure of our everyday lives.2 As the fortunes of the PMC elites rose, the class insisted on its ability to do ordinary things in extraordinary, fundamentally superior and more virtuous ways: as a class, it was reading books, raising children, eating food, staying healthy, and having sex as the most culturally and affectively advanced people in human history.”
The Professional Capitalist Class sees its primary political outlet in the Democratic Party. Education is rapidly becoming one of the strongest predictors of a district’s voting trends. The donations of major Democratic Candidates are dominated by the financial sector, the tech sector, as well as university administrators, the gatekeepers of the credentials for these industries.
The Professional Working Class
For decades, Americans have been taught that a college degree will secure a stable, financial future. And to an extent, that is true. A college graduate with a bachelor’s degree, on average, will make over 70% more in income than a non college graduate. High salaries in jobs like engineering, computer science, medicine, and academia make these jobs desirable for a lot of people.
Of course, many people in these fields are trapped in mountains of student debt. And plenty of people still fall through the cracks and end up in dead-end jobs, unemployed, or saddled with student debt. But for the most part, the higher wages and generally better working conditions (it’s rare to find a software engineering office without air conditioning) give these workers less of an incentive to engage in class struggle.
To be clear, capitalist exploitation is still happening in these industries. A coder at Google might make a six figure salary. But her labor is earning her boss a seven or eight figure salary. Still, of the many demands the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) is making, including banning Donald Trump from social media, higher pay is not one of them.
The relatively comfortable salaries of these jobs give these workers a degree of political independence from their bosses. Plenty of DSA members are college graduates, who work in more technical industries. But for the most part, the professional working class find themselves following the same cultural and political trends as their bosses. One of the biggest rallying cries among the early protests of Donald Trump’s Presidency was “If Hillary was President I’d be at Brunch”. With financial stability seemingly secured, many professional workers find threats to political and social stability to be the largest political issues in their lives.
It would be a mistake to say that class struggle never occurs among professional workers. Teachers and nurses both have college degrees as part of their jobs’ credentials, and yet today during the pandemic they are often at the front line of labor struggle. This is because in part, due to the nature of their jobs, they are exposed to working conditions that engineers will rarely endure, and for significantly lower pay. Specifically, their jobs force them to interact hands-on with the public. Being public services, often first in line to be targeted by austerity, a teacher or nurse in West Virginia is tasked with rehabilitating and providing for the most vulnerable residents of an already-impoverished community. This is a deeply radicalizing experience, which is why these professions account for a disproportionate share of DSA’s membership.
The Non-Professional Capitalist Class
The iron rule of capitalism is that for every winner, there’s a loser. And the greatest losers of the Silicon Valley conquest of the economy are the former lords and princes of the patchwork of fiefdoms that comprised post-war America. These are the small business owners, the bodega managers, the small farmers, and the church pastors. These were the “self-made captains of industry” that defined the old “American dream”. These were community leaders, people even the most downtrodden workers looked up to as the end state of a life hard worked.
In their heyday, capitalism existed on a bedrock of cultural values that maximized productivity and surplus value. The nuclear family; abstinence towards sex, drugs, and alcohol; and racial segregation were all constructs to encourage a division of labor ideal for a newly industrialized economy. Those who somehow climbed the rungs to success held these values with pride, and aggressively enforced them through the institutions available to them.
But those were the values of old capitalism. Amazon has no problems with racial diversity or abolishing traditional gender roles. If anything, having both parents working full time doubles the number of potential full time workers available. Bloated HR departments rigorously staffed with “diversity managers” are an efficient way to keep the workforce in a state of constant training, while also discouraging multiracial organizing along class lines.
As the Professional Capitalist Class continues to “disrupt” local business, it creates a set of capitalists and managers who are suddenly very susceptible to populism. Just as a college graduate from a middle income family suddenly being exposed to the conditions of an inner-city public school is a deeply radicalizing experience, so is a mom-and-pop store owner suddenly seeing their entire life’s work brought to dust by the whims of a tech giant. Despite their “rough” appearance and seemingly radical rhetoric, a large number of the hooligans who rioted at the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump were small businesses owners.
While they are the current vanguard of the Republican Party, not everyone in the Non-Professional Capitalist Class is Republican. Black small businesses are a key parcel of the Democratic Political machine, and represent one of the most conservative voices in the party’s politics. It was this class that, wielding hegemonic influence over many working class, black communities, did everything it could to sink the Sanders campaign.
The Non-Professional Working Class
Finally, we have the largest of these categories, and yet the one that has remained elusive to much of modern socialist political organizing. The decline of unions, and the growth of subcultures defined less by geography and more by educational background and interest, make it very difficult for the Non-Professional Working Class to voice an independent political line. This is especially true in the still-segregated deep south, where the racial chauvinism of the ruling class has historically been leveraged to maintain deep racial polarization among workers. Hence, one can come to the mistaken conclusion that this class is just politically conservative, whether it comes down to Donald Trump dominating West Virginia, or Joe Biden dominating the Cotton Belt.
But class struggle happens here all the time. It isn’t always identified as such, but it happens. We see that struggle as I write these in the Bessemer Amazon Warehouse, which is fighting to unionize despite overwhelming institutional opposition.
Still, it isn’t always easy to build. Workers in these jobs face immense risks to organizing. Large sections of these class are undocumented, which puts the additional shadow of deportation over their every move. Already anxious about their economic circumstances, many of these workers find the subculture of activist spaces to be inaccessible or alienating. Non-professional workers often share the conservative cultural values of their bosses or their churches, which creates further barriers.
What is to be done?
The conflicts we see in American politics are along the axis of “Professional” vs “Non-Professional”. But we must recognize that fundamentally, this is an artificial and irrelevant distinction for socialists. All workers, whether they have a college degree or not, are exploited by capitalism and will stand to gain from a rigorous, universal socialist program.
But this requires us to be proactive and conscious of which barriers and divisions should be ignored. It may be discomforting to organize in a community that does not share one’s cultural values, but the goal of our efforts must be to dismantle the artificial nature of the culture war in favor of the issues that make a real, material difference in people’s lives.
An engineer being overworked by her boss, a teacher being forced to work with broken materials in an unsafe classroom, and a factory worker struggling to bring home a decent living all face the same fundamental exploitation. We must organize together for a broad, multi-racial, multi-cultural class struggle. And once we’re able to do that, there’s nothing that can stop us from winning.
